You can add this to the ongoing attempts by smaller companies to get publicity and to add a new slant to their operatic offerings.
Shadwell Opera is next up with two short films to show up on Channel 4’s Random Acts series, following up a long tradition of artist’s films shown in their graveyard slots. Remember all too well as an art student looking out for those short film slots to watch innovative/quirky work by visual artists. Glad to see that they still give the oxygen of publicity to creators of non mainstream content. Their engagement with the world of artistic creation in the periphery of popular culture, has been one of their main points of differentiation from the other commercial channels.
For instance they showed a Wolfgang Tillmans film of boiling peas, so mundane but yet so close to his main photographic practise.
Shadwell Opera have teamed up with Tigerlily Films and Multi-Story Orchestra to create two opera shorts. The first of these, Serenade, will be shown at midnight on 22nd January 2014
Featuring, baritone Ashley Riches, currently a Jette Parker Young Artist at the Royal Opera House, conducted by Chris Stark, produced by Nikki Parrott and directed by Jack Furness, it is a witty operatic vignette that stumbles upon Don Giovanni’s famous serenade in a Hackney housing estate.
‘I’ve always experimented with putting opera into different contexts and seeing what comes out. It’s a natural operatic thing to mash as many art forms together as possible, and this was a great opportunity to present some opera in a format that lots of people will recognize.
Everyone is very literate when it comes to television and images generally, and I wanted to capitalise on that knowledge base and smuggle opera, guerrilla style, into the living rooms of the nation. Now we’re planning how to break this out into longer forms.’ Jack Furness
So if you are up at the crack of midnight, tune in and see how the Don fares in Hackney.
You can view many of the previous Random Acts films on the rather snazzy Channel 4 website: http://randomacts.channel4.com/
For more information on the project and to see both films: http://www.lyricimage.net/
Or watch it right here…
George's musings... 